Page 3398 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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and present staff at Bimberi, who speak highly of that teacher, saying what a great teacher she was and how well she got on with the kids et cetera, but that teacher was driven out of Bimberi.
Let us look at the other cases—the cases where Bimberi staff said to us, and it is reported in here, that they were got at. They were directed away and told, “You don’t need to go and talk to the inquiry.” When the inquiry briefed Mr Seselja and me, they said that, yes, those things did happen. Those things did happen and they did not investigate it, beyond recognising that it did happen, because the perpetrators of that pushing aside had moved on. “We did not actually look to see what the culture was that enabled people in management to say, ‘You don’t need to talk to this inquiry. No, you don’t need to do that’.” What was the enabling factor of that? What was it in the culture of the directorate that this minister oversees that is so toxic that we had people coming to us in droves to complain about how they were prevented from going to talk to the inquiry?
I tabled in here the minutes of the ATSI group—and Ms Hunter referred to it this morning—which said, “If you are approached by the inquiry, go and see (insert the name of an officer here) and we will tell you what to say,” essentially. When I received that email, the heading in the email was, “I didn’t think I could be surprised anymore”. The person who sent me that, who has longstanding experience in government administration, was appalled. When I raised this with the human rights commissioner and the young people’s commissioner they said, “If you look at the circulars that were sent out, there was no evidence. You know, they sent out all our circulars when we asked them to and they did notify staff about our inquiry and they did send out our circulars.” They said there was no real tangible evidence “except the fact that people said to us that they had been got at”.
There was a culture of getting at people, of bullying people, of driving people out. We have a litany here. We have Mr Buchanan, we have the lady from urban services, we have the teacher from the Murrumbidgee education centre, we have the woodwork teacher from the Murrumbidgee education centre, we have all the staff at Bimberi and the Murrumbidgee education centre who were told, “Don’t go near the inquiry.” The thing is that there were people who did go to the inquiry and did make anonymous submissions because they were afraid to put their name to things. I had a number of phone calls. I can remember phone calls on the weekend from staff who were saying to me, “Vicki, what will happen to me if I go to the inquiry? If I say to the inquiry the things that I have said to you, will they take it seriously? Will I lose my job or will my prospects for advancement in the ACT public service be badly affected?”
That did not just happen once; it happened on a number of occasions. Many people came to me with concerns about whether they should go to the inquiry because of the culture of bullying—all of the things that Mr Seselja and Mr Hanson have spoken about: the corrupt and odious culture of putting people down when they disagree with you or that they have the audacity to show where there has been maladministration. At Bimberi there has been maladministration and it has been brought to light because the staff put their neck on the line and because the Canberra Liberals stood up for them.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (4.06): The Greens will not be supporting the amendment today. I have gone through in my
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